The Committee of Concerned Journalists was supposed to be a temporary project. With a finite amount of money and time to produce a finite product, founders Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel planned to open a conversation about the problems facing journalism, write a small summary report and move on after a year.

But history - some may call it fate - has a way of preserving truly innovative ideas. Consider the Eiffel Tower in Paris; it was supposed to be dismantled after serving as the showpiece for the 1889 World's Fair. Nearly 120 years later, it still stands as an international symbol.

Still standing after 10 years, the Committee of Concerned Journalists (CCJ) has become an international symbol for change in journalism. Now a consortium of more than 7,000 reporters, editors, publishers, owners and academics worried about the future of journalism, CCJ humbly began with a little money, a rough idea and two journalists who firmly believed that change had to come from within the profession.

That dedication earned CCJ a prestigious Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism in 2006, proof that some ideas were just meant to be.

Against the Odds

Kovach and Rosenstiel, both successful journalists, didn't appear to need more work on their plates back in 1996. Kovach had been in the industry for nearly 40 years, having served in such prominent positions as chief of The New York Times' Washington bureau and editor of the Atlanta Journal Constitution. At the time he was curator of the Nieman Fellowships at Harvard University, a mid-career training program for journalists.

Rosenstiel, the younger of the two, had fewer years in the business but experiences that made up for it. A former media critic for the Los Angeles Times and MSNBC and former chief congressional correspondent for Newsweek, Rosenstiel was a frequent commentator for radio, television and print.

Tom Rosenstiel taught a master class for Missouri Journalism students on Nov. 1, the same day that he received the Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism.

But when the Pew Charitable Trusts approached Rosenstiel in 1996 about developing an initiative to help journalists face the rapidly changing industry, he carved out time to pursue the idea. He took the proposition to Kovach, and the two debated how to make this initiative successful when others had failed. The Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press had tried to outline the responsibilities of the press in 1947, but, according to Kovach, it had depended on the wrong group of people to make conclusions.

"It failed, primarily because it was a bunch of academics," Kovach said. "My notion was to take what the Hutchins Commission set out to do but do it with journalists and get them involved in the discussion about who they were, how they did their work and what their responsibilities were. It was ill-formed in my mind, but I knew it had to be journalists."

With a sketch of an idea, Rosenstiel spent nine months traveling the country, talking to prominent people in the industry about their jobs and what could make a difference. He returned to Kovach with a list of ideas and interventions gathered from his fieldwork, but Kovach wasn't satisfied. In that moment, Rosenstiel realized the weight of the task that had fallen on their shoulders.

"When I went back to Bill (Kovach), he said 'I'm disappointed in this grab bag collection of ideas you have. Journalism's problems are so big that it needs a big initiative to address them, something commensurate with the scope of what you're taking on,'" Rosenstiel said. "So, I didn't think I had the standing to do this, and I don't, but Bill basically compelled me and the others who had been engaged in this to do something bigger than we thought we otherwise would have taken on."

A Turning Point

For Kovach, it wasn't a matter of having the "standing" to fix journalism's problems. It was simply a matter of time.

"When I got to Harvard and started running the Nieman program, for the first time in my entire career, I had time to think about what I had been doing for more than three or four hours a day. When I was a reporter and editor, I never had the time to think about what the hell I'd done, why I did it, how I did it," Kovach said. "I was at Harvard working with a new generation of journalists, I really, really felt fulfilled that I was having the chance to help them in their year at Harvard think about what they did and what they wanted to do when they got back."

Bill Kovach taught a master class for Missouri Journalism students on Nov. 1, the same day that he received the Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism.

Kovach, however, had been running the program since 1989 and was ready to hand over the reigns to new blood. He could have retired in the traditional sense, putting his successful career behind him. Luckily for CCJ, the thought never crossed his mind.

"I'd spent 40 years in journalism and learned my journalism from mentors. I didn't go to journalism school. I knew what I owed to the people who brought me up," Kovach said. "So with my time running out, I knew that when I retired (from Harvard) I was going to have to have something to do; and I wanted to do something to continue the idea of giving back to the thing that I had loved."

The pieces started to fall into place. Rosenstiel had the money to get the initiative started, and Kovach had the time. The result was a July 1997 meeting at Harvard among 30 of the most prominent journalists in the country. They didn't issue a set of rules, regulations or guidelines; instead, they worked on issuing a statement of concern about the future of journalism and invited others to participate.

"The way to define the principles or key responsibilities of journalism was to have this be both a reporting exercise and an open conversation among journalists, as opposed to a closed commission," Rosenstiel said. "That's what we began that day in Harvard."

Following several weeks of drafting, the initial members of CCJ signed and began disseminating their official statement of concern. It was late August, and a twist of historical fate was about to propel CCJ into the spotlight. On Aug. 31, 1997, Princess Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris amidst a pack of paparazzi.

"Everybody reacted violently to the way the press had descended on the scene - the lack of exercising any sense of responsibility, chasing her to her death," Kovach said.

The world was now concerned about the responsibilities of journalists, and the CCJ concept took off. Plans for eight open-discussion forums about journalism jumped to 21 when others started offering funds and host sites. The 30 original concerned journalists turned into thousands, and the pamphlet report Kovach and Rosenstiel had initially planned to write after the forums turned into a book, The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect (2001).

Taking Off

After the one-year project turned into two years with no signs of slowing, it quickly became evident that the original finite plan for CCJ was taking a permanent detour.

"We had imagined that the committee would actually phase out," Rosenstiel said. "We'd write this report, and we'd fold our tent."

Kovach credits Rosenstiel, however, with continuing the project. Rosenstiel encountered a team of academics who were on a similar track as CCJ, except they had done depth interviews asking journalists self-identify their values. One of their key findings, according to Rosenstiel, was that journalists failed to pass down lessons learned from one generation to the next.

"Even inside newsrooms, if you asked journalists where did they learn what they did, at the top was 'trial and error on my own part,' followed by 'stealing ideas from my colleagues,'" Rosenstiel said. "At the bottom of that list was professional training offered by newsrooms, and next to the bottom - I hate to say this - was journalism school."

Kovach and Rosenstiel used that finding and the information distilled from the forums as the basis for the Traveling Curriculum, a newsroom training program where experienced facilitators encourage journalists and editors to critically evaluate their principles and goals and the methods they use to meet them. Since 2001, the Traveling Curriculum has conducted more than 300 sessions at more than 120 print, broadcast, radio and Internet newsrooms, reaching more than 7,300 journalists.

Today, CCJ is thriving with more than 7,000 members, adaptable versions of the Traveling Curriculum, research and commentary about the state of journalism and tools for journalists. The Elements of Journalism has been translated into 15 languages, and it has become required reading at Missouri and in many classrooms and newsrooms around the world. In 2003, CCJ and its research partner, The Project for Excellence in Journalism, produced another book, Thinking Clearly: Cases in Journalist Decision-Making. It was edited by Rosenstiel, who is also the director of PEJ, and deputy director Amy Mitchell.

The Committee of Concerned Journalists has become journalism's Eiffel Tower, built by Kovach and Rosenstiel's determination that journalism can and will do better. CCJ has endured because there is no fixed solution to the ever-changing journalism industry. It's an open conversation, Rosenstiel said, that is dependent upon a relationship among practitioners, research scholars and the next generation of journalists. For that reason, CCJ partnered with the Missouri School of Journalism and the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute in 2006 to build a bridge between research, experimentation and the newsroom - and to strengthen CCJ's foundation for the future.

"We're conceited enough to believe in our ability to tie university research like what goes on at Missouri directly into what's going on in the newsroom, rather than leave it in an academic institution," Kovach said. "It's about taking the research into the newsroom so it's working with current, real life events and problems. That's a better kind of journalism education, and Missouri is an ideal place to do that."

Click here for a version of this article on the Missouri School of Journalism Website.

Click below for streaming audio of a Master Class Kovach and Rosenstiel taught at the Missouri School of Journalism on Nov. 1, 2006 before receiving the Missouri Honor Medal.

Committee of Concerned Journalists Master Class
MP3 File; 11.2MB, 54:32.

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